Tipster Architecture

Tipster was a program of research and development in the areas of
information retrieval, extraction, and summarization, funded by DARPA
and various other Government agencies from 1991 to 1998.

One part of this effort involved the creation of a standard
architecture (standard interfaces) for systems doing information
retrieval and extraction. As part of Phase II of Tipster (1994-96),
this architecture was developed by a group of contractors and
Government personnel (the Tipster Architecture Working Group), chaired
by Ralph
Grishman of NYU. Some further refinements to the architecture
were made in Phase III (1996-98) through a set of Tipster Architecture
Working Groups.

Subsequent revisions of the design document may be found at the
Government-maintained
Tipster Web Site.

For an overview of the Tipster architecture, you may also want to browse
through the
Architecture presentation slides used at
the 12-month Tipster meeting, May 17-19, 1995.

Several additional documents were prepared by the Tipster
Architecture Committee (which consists of representatives of the
Government agencies involved in the Tipster program) to define the
goals of the architecture effort and the process for qualifying
systems as "Tipster compliant". These may also be found at the
Tipster Web Site.

There have been several implementations of Tipster
Architecture-compliant systems, including
GATE,
developed at the University of Sheffield, which is free for research
purposes, and comes in source and binary form for common platforms.

(For information about other natural language processing research
at the NYU Proteus Project,
click here).